You're loving people like your parents loved you.

You're loving them when you're bored, when you're sad, when they can give you something.

You're loving the people who love like your parents.

They're cold, they're flighty, they don't like to answer your calls.

You're loving people like they're adults.

You expect them to love you like you're a child, unconditional, patient, kind.

But you're loving them like they have grown up.

They haven't.

You're loving people romantically, not realistically.

You love them because they're adventurous, loving them feels homey, it feels right.

It's not right. It's not wrong but it's not right. It's just life.

They're just as unstable and deeply dangerously human as you are.

You're loving the people you think can read your mind, take swims in your grey matter.

You're loving the idea of divine and instinctual oneness, an idea which is false.

They are not your counterpart. They are their own whole. So are you.

Life, I've learned, is about where our wholeness decides to touch.

You're loving people like you love yourself.

You love them when convenient, when you're reminded to, when they're easy to love.

You treat them, to some extent, like the waste of space it's easy to think you are.

They aren't. You're not. No one is.

You're loving everyone wrong.

    Some mornings the light made me angry. It filtered in through the car windows in just the right way to warm my arms and my hair and peel away the sleep from my eyes and the dust particles that hung in its rays were all my mind could focus on. The light strangled me in that way I imagined I would end up strangling someone, with a smile and a “good morning my love,” its hands firmly wrapped around my throat and its kisses dried on the sides of my lips. There wasn’t any escaping it, I gave up a long time ago tucking blankets into the windows, so instead I groaned into the leather seats and listened to cars whiz by. Morning felt more real than anything else, and that made me angrier than the sun insisting I wake up. Morning made everything a composition, painted it over with a warm lacquer of haze and fused my skin to the sunlight that I hated. Early hours were hours of feeling the seats of the Ford and my breath against my sweatshirt and looking out at the trees of the park and being able to almost feel their bark against my skin, grating against my freckles. It unnerved me and so I let myself indulge in reality very little, sitting up, pulling on my jeans in bouts of frenzied flailing, bumping my head on the ceiling, and crawling into the front seat. The key always felt good in my hand as I pulled it out of my pocket. Heavier than a gun.

     I drove until my ass got sore, which was usually around noon. At gas stations I cracked my knees and my shoulders and took my sweatshirt off in the hopes that somehow that made me more like a person though I knew full when then that it didn’t. The sweatshirt made me look more like a road weary traveler, without it I looked homeless. I was homeless in that way that everyone on the road is homeless, vulnerable and paranoid, gliding across the pavement in search of somewhere to squat and pretend they lived. We were all homeless on the highway but they didn’t know it. I hardly knew it. I knew lots of things, though. Lots of things that I thought about with my hands lazily draped on the wheel, things I thought about sitting with my legs criss-crossed under diner tables, things I thought about late at night looking at the groggy flickers of light in the distance, cities like artificial fires in the trees of the various valleys.

     I used to think about roads like they were scars, cities like bruises, mines like gashes. I used to think about people as if they acted upon the earth, unnatural, not animal, not God. But somehow the driving made me realize the rawness of people. The duality of earth. These communities of people, though gaseous and poisonous and ugly, were just as valid as the nests of bluejays tucked into the edges of forests. We collected what we found and created ourselves a home of the finest achievable comfort. Yes, we were animals. Not Gods. Not even in between. We were animals, huddled in the darkness, growling at each other as we tried to carve a space in the earth in which we could raise our young and die. Something about driving under bridge after bridge made you recognize in that deep part between your eyebrows the patterns of man were also the patterns of beast. Find shelter from the storm. Kill competition. Claim food. Find mate. Pass on genes. Die. We had simply become intelligent enough to trick ourselves into thinking we were more intelligent. Only animals could destroy like we do.

     These were my thoughts as I drove. Increasingly angry, increasingly morbid, I held onto the blackness of it all with growing intensity. The radio dulled it, the standardized hum of the universe, with light tangy beats and grotesquely emotional ballads. I would nod my head. Good song. Turn the knob. Bad song. There wasn’t anything quite so simple as a good song and a bad song then. If I didn’t like it, I didn’t listen to it. It felt like absolute control.

I. I. I. I stutter on the page like I've never stuttered with my mouth. It's too fleeting, too slippery, too dangerous to form in my throat so I desperately attempt to form it in ink but still, what are the words? How can I know them? I know so many but I can't find a way to string them together in a way that would effectively transfer the glowing ringlets in my spine up my hand and onto this page and into your heart. I wish I was a musician- they have it slightly easier I think. Music would tell you so clearly what I'm trying to say but I know no symphony in existence with this particular message and I lack the ear to create it.

I want to write a love letter.

I want it to burn with warmth and drip of passionate, prideful, independently wealthy adoration. I want my words to ring in your ears when you lay down to sleep and I want them to be the first thought rattling in your skull in the morning. That would be a fraction of the weight I'm bearing for you on my shoulders. I have weak shoulders, you know that. 

What I hold for you radiates like the sun and I've been burnt alive, I've died of heatstroke a million times over. You're...indescribable. You're the universe. If they sold a guide to loving I'd be the first to buy it, read it, learn it, live it, if it meant you got the best love, the most refined, practiced, raw, and uncoordinated. I would calculate chaos if it meant you understood the seriousness of my devotion to the space between your eyes and to what's held within your ribs.

She was incredible, dangerous, enlightening. She was wind and water and ice and she made the dark deep parts of me light up because she was so strangely mystically familiar. She smelled like spearmint, tasted like rain, she was just like me, I was so infinitely sure of that fact and that fact only. I whispered in her ear, I begged her to love me too, love me like no one has bothered to, stay with me like no one has dared. She laughed, held me close, and whispered back.

"No."

In the morning I kneel. I clasp my hands together. I ask for forgiveness. I dig caverns into my soul and ask the universe to fill them. I pray in the last rays of nighttime for proof of deity and proof of hope.

I rise. I dress. I go. I read the Bible. I study the words that somehow organized in different combinations are supposed to do something meaningful. I beg that meaningful shred of something to materialize, those little blots of ink to weave together into blankets of sense that I can wrap myself in. But they don't.

I work hard. I work until my head pounds. The repetition hurts in the best kind of way, it hurts like love hurts, it hurts like truth hurts. I watch the clock. Maybe sometime soon, I think. Maybe not now but maybe sometime. The hour comes and goes and nothing. The next hour comes and goes and nothing.

At lunch I sit in the park on a bench. It's cold but I like the cold. It's lonely but I like being alone. My hands hold each other like they do when I pray like apostles hold their own hands in paintings. People walk past and my soul reches out and asks them to touch it. Asks for just a little bit of warmth. They keep walking.

I'm home in the night and the shadows lay their heavy arms around my shoulders. I shovel food into my mouth but it doesn't satiate the hunger. I'm hungry I'm hungry I'm hungry, I whisper into the world.

Before I fall asleep I kneel again. My knees hurt. I try to breath, I ask the air to enter my lungs, I ask my lungs to breath my air. Let me hear let me speak let me feel. Please please please.

No. No one says it, but I feel it in the empty spaces that reach into me and laugh at how much emptier I am than them. No. No. No. I'm told no by nothing.

I get up. I go to sleep.

In the night it comes to me in waves of angry emotion as I lie awake in the dark. It rushes up my stomach and into my throat, it squeezes the air out of me, it pounds the piece of skull behind my eyes into dust. It plays no tricks, it doesn't need to. The words, the thoughts, the feelings I long to share burn inside my veins in floods of kerosene and it knows this, it sets me on fire. Just enough that I can feel my body ache with wanting to be held. Wanting to be looked at. It hits me over the head until I can think of nothing else, until within my crushed skull is a slush of gray matter. I am alone. I am deathly, painfully, fully alone.

Keep me

Keep me

Keep me

Keep me

Keep me

Air is heavy and wet

Hangs off my skin as if I am a cloud

Tastes like soil

Crumbling in my mouth

Smells raw and new and natural

Smells like velvet smells like spring

Feels under my palms like life